They in the Sky

A Story by BelAir

an exploration into the depth of Uncle Oren's lonliness . . . and the sounds he's been hearing above his country home

The old man’s eyes narrowed again, and he stopped because it was evident he wasn’t listening—to him, anyway. Nathan waited, not saying a word, until they smoothed out on him again. But not without the slightest, quick flicker to the window, of course.

“Are you okay?”

His uncle shook out another Camel and struck a match from a book that lay on the table.

“Ayuh. Why d’you always ask me that? If I’m ‘okay?’ ”

Nathan shook his head, dropped his eyes to his hands on the table and his class ring glinting in the sun which diced through the kitchen window’s cracked and yellowed blinds. He said, low enough so he wasn’t sure the old man would hear him, “You know why I ask you, Uncle Oren.”

“I’ll be damned if I don’t.”

“Well, you seem a little . . . distracted most of the time.”

He still didn’t dare raise his eyes. Didn’t want to see that. It was all too easy to recall Uncle Oren back when, a beer and a cowboy hat, Uncle Oren who supplied him his first cigarette and laughed himself into a coughing fit as he watched him gag and wretch. Those days when Aunt Sarah was alive and glowing. And, as much as Nathan tried to dismiss the thought, a battered old pen hovering over the legal pad in front of him . . . hadn’t all of this started around the time she passed away? That seemed distant and hazy, though; things had a way of getting buried and lost under his schooling. But a very small and unfavorable voice was always there for reply. Yes, it had. And was that surprising? His aunt and uncle had been together since they were seventeen. She was unable to bear children, and on many occasions he and his siblings were taken up as her own while their mother sorted her own issues with their father into hand.

“Distracted, uh?” Uncle Oren took a long drag of his cigarette and gazed out of the window that overlooked the front lawn. “Well.”

Yes, Nathan wanted to snap at him, distracted. His hand clenched the pen tighter.

No, manic is more in the park.

He waited for his uncle to return to him—then they could finish the list and he could be on his way—and when he did the anger vanished. Nathan observed the note pad.

MILK EGGS BREAD BUTTER C. CUTS

That was breaking record for the two of them, actually. He’d pulled the old man out of it enough to get five items down within the past half-hour.

“Anything else you need?”

“Nuh. Don’t believe so, Nat.”

Now he was eyeing the clouds overhead, and Nathan realized how little he saw his uncle away from this table when he came to visit. There was a time when the two of them would take a six pack out onto the back lawn or sit along the edge of the pond dock, discussing women, cars, locals, money, s**t jobs, how his schooling was going, how the rest of the family was. Only now, when they did happen to fall deep into conversation, the topics were usually of a more erratic matter, interesting at first, as Uncle Oren’s off-the-wall tales always were. But these . . .

Nathan rose, grabbing the man’s attention for just a moment. He walked across the peeling floor to the cabinets on the other side of the room, as he had been forced to do now more than once. He opened the lowest cabinet first and staggered back, gasping, as a plump rat landed against the counter top below and began to scurry through the maze of glass jars and tobacco tins and boxes, knocking most if it to the floor and shattering it.

The old man didn’t turn away from the window.

“Damn it.”

Nathan searched (timidly) under the sink for something to sweep with and discovered a thin stack of old newspaper prints on the counter under a bag of potatoes—which no longer looked (or smelled) like potatoes but closer to something he’d seen on a B-horror movie as a kid, the pod-stage of a new alien life form. Nathan swept the glass up, threw it away with the potatoes, and added them to the list.

Most of the cabinets he peeked in after were just as empty or else littered with scraps of rotting groceries, and he gave up.

“Where the hell is all of your food going, anyway? I bought you enough to last you a month two weeks ago.”

The old man met his eyes as he came to the table. “Needed some of it for them. Traps.”

A flare of anger rose in him.

“That food’s meant for you, not—them or whoever. For you.”

“I know it.”

Nathan crossed the grocery list out. Under it he wrote: FOOD FOR THEM. A grim smile just barely curled his lips before vanishing.

Just humor him, will you? Talk with him about it or something, since it’s the only thing he has now. Doesn’t matter if you think it’s a bunch of hooblah or not, and you know it.

“What do you mean ‘traps,’ Uncle Oren?”

“Oh—put down cigarettes, Nat—oh, just sumpin to reel em in. Tried everything else.”

“Did it work?”

“Nuh. Food’s gone, but probably a mountain lion or coyote took it.”

“Well, I’m going to get you more groceries, but since it didn’t work I want you to keep them. I’ll be back later.”

He shuffled through the clutter of belongings tracing his living room to the back door. His uncle was still studying the front lawn.

“Hey.”

He turned.

“Try a couple of those Iron Citys you have in the fridge and a few of your Camels. Maybe that’ll change their minds.”

Uncle Oren grinned for the first time that day.

“Maybe I will, at that.”

The smile dropped from Nathan’s face as soon as he stepped out into the muggy

summer air.

It all started with the death of his aunt Sarah. Nathan knew that. Everybody in his family had, but they didn’t have any way of knowing just how bad he was becoming now—the closest relation the two of them knew besides each other was Nathan’s mother, buried in her grave on the outskirts of their little Colorado town. The rest either moved away or, like his mother, passed away. They didn’t have any idea how Uncle Oren spent every night searching the darkness of his lawn, from the kitchen table, or the way his eyes seemed to be growing back into his skull, frightened when they weren’t wandering in a lost and intangible land of their own, how his yellowed T-shirts began to fall in a kind of drape over his shoulders, or, as there was most of the time, the utter exhaustion also in his eyes, the sadness, that he was fighting a war Nathan knew nothing about.

There wasn’t a single detectable trace of the adventure Nathan was in store for when Aunt Sarah died. There was only the heavy sadness that comes with losing a loved one, and then (all of the family was there to witness the beginning of his slow progression; that would have made it two-three years ago), as the weeks passed, the things he did in order to cover the pain up. He became louder, grinned more—it could never reach his eyes, who was he fooling?—drank more. All of them noticed it and none of them mentioned it outside of the pitied little glances they threw to each other at the time. Whatever it took for him to find comfort was their motto.

Maybe they were caught, because the behavior stopped; the deep sadness returned, finally handing him into an even deeper silence nobody could pull him out of. His Uncle Oren stayed that way for a good year, until . . . well, now . . .

Well, now, this—this started with a single question. Nathan could still picture that brisk fall evening, the two of them sharing Coke on the back lawn, and watching Rover—that was Uncle Oren’s new dog, a chocolate lab Nathan discovered along the edge of the highway on his way over one afternoon—wrestle a once-missing boot to the ground. That’s what he’d been looking at anyway. Uncle Oren had other things on his mind.

Nathan, d’you believe in UFOs?

What?

Alins? All of that?

Just like it was these days, he didn’t know much of anything besides the holy textbook and sacred pen, didn’t have time to. When his uncle Oren asked him that the only answer he could give was a shrug, as the words of one of his science professors echoed somewhere off in his mind: The harder thing for me to believe is that we’re the only existence in this entire universe.

But, hell, of course the guy was going to believe that.

Professors were nuts, anyway.

Uncle Oren became attached to Rover the first hour the two were in acquaintance, and likewise. Someone to keep him company, Nathan figured. And, living off a rock road settled deep in the Colorado country, Rover didn’t risk getting flatted over by traffic, so when the dog turned up missing almost four months later, his disappearance was a mystery to them both.

Coyotes or mountain lions, Nathan thought.

Uncle Oren’s eyes across the picnic table exposed a whole new story.

Instead of the silence expected to come, curiosity took its place.

This was where things really took off.

Again, the discussion happened over coffee. Nathan had been checking his watch regularly. He was scheduled for a 11-3 shift at the Kawasaki plant up Denver way, but when he saw the old man’s behavior something kept him from leaving early. He was jittery, like he had a secret too urgent to hold inside for much longer, and in a way, he did.

Did he discover the change then?

Some days (like today), as he was traveling down the country road to the house, he wondered if it would be different if he hadn’t brought the dog home.

Are you okay, Uncle Oren?

Course. I’m doin fine as can be after they—he motions upward—took my dog.

What are you saying?

He c***s one eyebrow at me and slows his words like he’s talking to a child.

They took my dog.

Who’s they?

They in the sky.

You mean aliens and UFOs? What would they want with a dog?

Observation.

I have to repeat the word over. He is nodding.

Isn that what we do, too, Nat, college-boy? He grins. We kill stuff and we look at it. See what makes what.

He came to a stop in the drive before reaching the house. He could see his uncle at the kitchen window watching him, and he turned away.

Nathan had no idea what the dummies were constructed to be but could guess their interiors for what it was worth: three pillows staked on their own fence posts and draped with old sheets, which stirred in the wind. And Uncle Oren hadn’t overlooked the finer details, he saw: a set of eyeballs for each—golf balls and black marker. They either were carelessly glued or sitting free on the pillows because a ball already rested on the ground below one dummy, and he watched a second drop.

He drove on.

Rover wasn’t the last experiment to be made, either. A few weeks gone, another canine showed up at Oren Jackson’s place, this one by the name of Scarlet, as written on her collar. She went missing after a week.

Nathan took a deep breath and opened his door.

Just humor him. Remember, whatever it takes for him to find comfort?

He glanced to his left at the dummies, goggling back at him

(observation)

and entered the garage.

A million flies woke on the unbearable heat. The garage was the worst. It was where Uncle Oren threw the garbage out when he didn’t have the energy to walk it around back to the burn barrel, and when Nathan didn’t have the time. They clustered in the trash bags, watching and waiting until their deaths.

As soon as he stepped into the kitchen, Nathan went to the coffee maker on the counter top beside the stove, cleared the clutter away from it as well as he could, and switched the button there to on. The old man prepared coffee before he came if he remembered. The one thing his body wasn’t lacking it was that. That and nicotine.

Coffee and a cigarette—the greatest combination the Lord ever made.

“So what do you have out there, Uncle Oren?”

He went to the table and took a seat. Two coffee mugs were sitting out for them.

Maybe he’ll be okay, because something’s been lifted from his heart by what he did out there on the lawn tonight.

Uncle Oren continued to analyze his work (grinning, almost) as if the genius of the idea was blocking any possible explanation from mind. He turned to him, and did smile.

“I got myself ‘nother little trap, Nat,” and nodded.

“Hmmm.”

“What do you think?”

Tried to smile. “Looks great . . . Do you think this one will be better?”

“Ayuh, I do.”

“And how’s it work, the trap?”

“Nuh, guess it’s not a trap, a real trap . . . They come, I wait. I wanna see em.” Something glimmered back in the cave of his eye sockets. “I wanna see it happen, Nat.”

What was he supposed to say to that? He ran his hand through his hair when the old man reverted to the window.

“Coffee?”

“Coffee’s fine. Coffee and a cigarette—The Lord’s greatest combination.”

A smile appeared on Nathan’s face. Hearing this again was heaven to his ears, like discovering an old photo of lost friends.

So maybe he is okay. Everything will be fine. It was just one of his “phases.” Another step in getting over Aunt Sarah.

He poured them coffee and wandered why his hand was shaking.

“Never see mucha critters out here, do we? Ain’t seen even a squirrel in a while or a hare. There use to be all of kinds when Sarah was living, I remember, when we first moved in.”

Nathan was shuffling through his bag for the lab data he wrote out earlier for a physics class. “Think you’ve got a mountain lion around, Uncle Oren?”

A low rumble came from the old man’s chest in the form of a chuckle, and he said nothing more.

The coffee was good enough on his mind to aid him in finishing his lab notes and onward to a procedure. He saw his uncle leave the table once to use the restroom (an outhouse jutting off the back wing of the house), he recalled while driving home that night. And all the while he found himself snipping glimpses of the sky which impended over him, and the stars, scalpel points pierced through the dark cloak, twinkling like Uncle Oren’s eyes had.

He was haunted in the nights following this, mostly by broken and inconceivable images: eery green men, traps that were no longer set with pillows dummies but humans, his uncle at the kitchen table, face obscured with smoke, all but that secretive sparkle it could not hide, and those words which still echoed in his subconsciousness: I wanna see them, Nat . . . They in the sky . . .

The days stretched longer at the height of the summer.

Nathan finally went to one of his professors. Mr. Eckerhert, his psychology professor.

That seemed fitting enough. His explanation was sweet and simple and perhaps, well, what Nathan had supposed all this time: Uncle Oren’s case sounded to be born out of trauma, and that was that.

Try talking to him about what happened—his wife’s passing, did you say? He might come down out of this after a while.

My uncle’s really not the heart-to-heart-talk kind of man, Mr. Eckerhert.

Maybe not, Nathan, but you’d be surprised.

He hoped.

And then anything he might have established solace in shattered as he was climbing the hill in which his uncle’s house sat and saw they were gone. Replaced instead by a dead mountain lion, strung up by its back paws from the nearby tree. A thick stream of blood coursed down its side from some unseen wound in its side and tainted the patch of earth below.

It would be so easy to just leave him here and never come back, and then my hands would be clean of all thi—

Something struck the top of his car, and Nathan slammed on his brakes and got out, circling around to the back end, and halting. A fox, as cleanly killed as the lion, gaped up at him with a grimace of hate. He raised his head and felt a scream rising from his throat and clamped his lips tight against it or anything else that might try escaping at the sight of the animals there. How the hell had he got them strung so high up there that he hadn’t spotted them when coming up the drive?

Nathan looked to the kitchen window. He was gone, and panic twinged in his stomach. He plunged back into the car, turned it off, and started up the rest of the drive to the garage—its main door was rolled up on its tract, he could see that—almost running.

He had cleared away a spot on the garage floor in which he sat hunkered over his work. Smears of blood encircled him.

“What the hell are you doing?”

The old man jerked around to where he stood, his lips pulled back a little from his teeth.

Kind of like that fox, Nathan thought, and then everything was enfolded under a hot rush of words, and by the time he realized, it was too late to hold anything back.

Uncle Oren continued grimacing at him, not knowing what to say.

“What are you doing? You can’t be doing things like this! They’re not traps, they’re not bait because all of this is in your head!”

He watched the old man’s eyes contracted like they had done so many times before. The thought of leaving passed through Nathan’s mind again when he saw Uncle Oren come to his feet, a rabbit plopping onto the floor from his lap. A trickle of blood spilled from its mouth as it did. Uncle Oren stood there studying Nathan for a moment. His clothes were stained with maroon patches of blood.

“Uncle Oren, I just think this, uh . . . Maybe—”

“I know what you think, boy. G’on un go. Get outta here.” Motioned toward the path winding downhill. He grabbed another coil of rope off of a corner table and unknotted it.

“I know what I saw, Nat.”

“Yeah, what did you see, Uncle Oren, and when? Little green men in metallic beekeeping suits, because I’d really like to know?”

His hands stopped in front of him, and one gnarled finger crept over his shoulder and shook at him. It was enough to freeze his blood. He couldn’t remember having ever smarted off to his uncle, even as a boy.

“Now, you justa watch what your sayin, boyo.”

Nathan cleared his throat.

“I . . . But what did you really see?”

“Nuh, heard em. I can hear em at night up there, when I’m in bed. Like the . . . drone of a plane, ‘cept it’s softer, and it lingers.

Nathan went to the steps under the house door and sat and examined his hands, anything but his uncle. He couldn’t look at that.

“Okay. Okay, but you can’t . . . I don’t think it’s a good idea what your doing now. If somebody happens out this way and they see that out there, they’re going to send somebody up here to talk to you.”

“Let em. Country people got to of heard it before, too. But botha us know, boy, we know nobody comes a lot round here, and the night’s coming and then they won’t be able to see it anyhow.”

He rose with the rabbit hanging at his feet.

There was indisputable excitement and humor in his eyes when he turned to Nathan again, and a slight grin.

“Juss one night to see how it goes, boy. I think it’ll work.” At the garage door: “How bout I fry up some potatoes and eggs or something and you can stay a while, uh?”

Nathan was left to think this over. Didn’t have to come into work tomorrow, anyway, that was true. No extra classes Saturday mornings for that matter, either.

He went to the door. Uncle Oren had pushed a metal ladder against the same tree’s trunk and was teetering on the first step and swiping for purchase. He caught a limb to the right of him, steadied himself, and then began to tie the rabbit around the arm. A bird swayed just inches above his head.

When he reached a point of satisfaction in his work and started down, Nathan was standing at the foot of the ladder to hold it.

Had the old man jumped just the slightest bit when he peered down? Did he really see that?

“Ayuh, thanks.”

Uncle Oren lowered and, when he was to the ground, lit a Camel from his pocket and surveyed the progress like he had a way of doing.

“Ayuh, that should do for now. Ain’t climbed a tree that high since I was a boy.” He patted Nathan’s shoulder and moved toward the house. “See how that goes. Now dinner.”

Something about the old man’s eyes, as he watched the day fade to shadow, face half-illuminated with its pink light. The other half the darkness of the kitchen overtook.

When his gaze touched Nathan’s own over their plates:

Fear.

And after this the night came rapidly, and day was almost completely stolen by the time they finished and put on more coffee. Both men were still silent. Once Nathan tried to turn a few of the house lights on, for which his uncle shook his head in protest. That was all.

He took to a repetitious reminder during these hours, that the only reason he was staying was for his uncle—maybe a little time with someone other than himself would be proven useful—but a little voice always held its place in the back of his mind: are you sure?

Time accumulated a roomful of Camel smoke and the smell of frying grease. The pot of coffee diminished quickly and Uncle Oren insisted (slip) another be put on. Once or twice Nathan thought he heard a house scurrying through the walls, or perhaps through a cabinet; he didn’t know which.

All of this—slowly slipping away–slip–

Slipping!

He snapped awake to his uncle, who was still (thankfully) looking out of the window. His eyes searched for a clock.

11:27

They had been sitting here for at least four hours.

—awake from his arms by the sound of the back door slamming shut. His body had pushed itself and he was standing before being aware of it

(Uncle Oren!)

and running for the door. Nathan could pick out his uncle’s unintelligible screams over the wall of blood pounding at his eardrums as he faltered off the front step and into the garage, but he knew he really had a situation on his hands when the first series of gunshots shattered the night air.

“They’re here! Come down, you b******s! Dirty dog-stealing b******s! C’mon!”

For just a moment there was a blinding flash, like looking into oncoming headlights, and it winked out into the night sky above the driveway.

“Fuckers stole my dog! B*****d thieves, stole my dog, stole everythin, d****t!”

He let another magazine from his Armalite AR-7 into the sky, screaming, and collapsed to his knees.

The wind picked up around him, pushing the animals on the trees (absent witnesses to this all) violently like pendulums, and Nathan could hear it oh yes the sounds they in the sky a smooth, gliding sound like tires rushing along a distant freeway, and then it was gone. Whatever visited them tonight had left.

He still lay in the road, the gun jumping in his hands as he fired again, only this time the threats behind the deafening bang of each bullet was replaced with sobs.

He clung to Nathan when he reached him.

The night was endless.

His uncle awoke at all different hours screaming, sometimes for his nephew to fetch his gun, sometimes for his wife, and other times there was only a straight scream that never woke either of them, and they joined together in a crazed tune, Nathan in the armchair, even with the rays of sunlight which beamed through the blinds touching his face.

The last time he came to he found Uncle Oren seated at the table with a cigarette and examining a newspaper. Last week, this week, from two years ago, who could guess. There was only relief. He took a seat in the chair opposite, folded his arms on the table, and looked out on the lawn.

“Did you, uh—”

“Ayuh. Took em down.”

“Okay . . . How–how are you doing this morning?”

“Fine, Nat. Been up since noon. What time d’you gotta be off to work?”

“I don’t. But I have two extra night seminars tonight. Once a month thing.”

A lie.

Could he see it?

“Oh, ayuh. Way to spend Saturday night.”

A false smile broke onto his face. “Yeah.”

“Leave when you want, boy. I’m fine now, I am.”

“I’ll have to be soon enough as it is,” he answered.

“And . . . Thanks, Nat.”

He tested that yellow grin.

It was a queer feeling, unexplainable. Enough to drive him out of bed in the night. Maybe it was the dreams. Had to be the dreams and sounds which even trailed him into subconsciousness—the screams of his uncle, the clatter his gun made hitting the gravel road.

(wrong)

He was racing down his apartment steps to the parking lot.

Something’s wrong.

The drive that normally seemed to be caught under the wheels of his tires for endless hours passed at unexpected speed. The highway was mostly deserted, but Nathan couldn’t deny a ceratin odd feeling that stole into him when he did meet the glare of headlights.

Everything at the house was just as it had been left.

He came into the kitchen, headed for the bedroom, and found both empty. The outhouse, garage. He blinked sweat from his eyes and stumbled for the table.

Only a note was left in his place, and a familiar sound breezing in through the open windows.

If you dont see me you will no why. I new what they want and so did you probably—a human..